mtvmusic.com.

MTV has launched a “Hulu” like web site, that is streaming thousands of videos. Good idea. A bit late to the game, and a bit sad that the quality leaves a lot to be desired (I have a TV - I want to see music videos on the damn TV!), but good for them.

Bad for Mac users, though.

Even if you have the latest Safari, Flash, and OS, you will not get these videos playing…unless you have a friendly web blogger help you.

Let’s look at the base URL of a music video:

http://www.mtvmusic.com/video/?id=55086

Nicely design page, with a big black viewing area…that plays nothing. Now, if you read the source code, you see the following “Embed” tag code:

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:uma:video:mtvmusic.com:55086

Wow. Full screen pixelated hell. Advice: reduce the size of your web browser window to improve the video quality.

Now, let’s put 2 + 2 together, and get a proper result (for the slow people out there, we are looking for “4″).

Each video has a unique number assigned to it (in this case: 55086). As we can’t get the base page to play the video, we alter the following URL:

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:uma:video:mtvmusic.com:

Paste that URL into your browser window, then at the end of that URL, type the unique number you got from the mtvmusic web site, and hit enter. Viola! We have playing music videos!

(html code rant)
Now, why do we have to go through this hell? The “web 2.0″ people at MTV decided to put the videos onto each web page only using the HTML tag “Embed”. The problem? To properly embed media, you need to use the “Object” tag *AND* the “Embed” tag, or else certain web browsers (ones that are picky about things like valid code) don’t work.

A quick web lesson on Object vs Embed

Results 1 - 20 of about 11,800,000 for object vs embed. (0.18 seconds)….ugh!

Don’t even get me started on the people who insist that “web site” is one word! ARGH!